Monthly Review -- “When Chávez speaks, we listen. But we don’t listen to those around
him.” This comment by a community activist interviewed by Iain Bruce,
and integrated into his wonderful exploration of the Bolivarian
Revolution from below, points to an essential characteristic—the unique
link at present (por ahora) between Hugo Chávez and the exploited and
excluded of Venezuela.

Bruce deliberately chooses to look at one side of this dialectical
relation, the side of the urban poor, workers and peasants. As he
indicates in his Introduction, “readers may be relieved to find only
occasional mention of Chávez or the upper echelons of the Bolivarian
movement in the central pages of this book. The aim is to look at the
experience of ordinary Venezuelan women and men, and to listen to their
voices, as a way of getting inside the process”. As a result,
Bruce helps us to distinguish speeches from reality, and we get to see
what is really happening. We share not only the exhilaration but also
the frustration of those below.

The Real Venezuela began in September 2004 with Iain
Bruce’s arrival in Venezuela as BBC correspondent. In the course of a
year, he visited communities and workplaces to file his regular
reports. Like so many others who have come to Venezuela and were
excited by what they heard and saw, he decided to write about it. But
there are several unique points about his account.

First, he is an excellent journalist, filmmaker and interviewer,
able to tell fascinating and important stories through the people
themselves. Second, he came back to Venezuela as an independent
observer in 2007, and returned to the very same experiences he had
visited when employed by the BBC; so, rather than single snapshots, we
see glimpses of a process and the pace of change (or lack of same).
Third, compared to many other observers, Bruce is politically
sophisticated and able to identify the significance in these minute
particulars, not only for the Venezuelan process but also, indeed, for any attempt to build socialism in the 21st century.

Above and below

The first voices Bruce introduces are those of the urban poor in the barrios
of Caracas. Here, as so many know, are great stories of change—the
social missions providing access to education and medical care, the
land committees, the water tables, and all those institutions that
emerged, beginning in 2003. We hear about the changes these
developments have meant in people’s lives and how the people themselves
identify those changes with Hugo Chávez. Yet Bruce also reveals that
there was a tradition of self-help in these communities, and that they
struggled together to build their homes and communities in the “hills”.
This, then, was one component of the urban movement—that “impressive
history of self-help initiatives”. To that was added a constant “stream
of demands and complaints” to those above and “a dynamic of rapid
response to each and every opportunity opened up to it from above”.

Consider, for example, the way people responded to Chávez’s call for
all public institutions to support “the organised communities” in
regularising land ownership. Urban land committees emerged throughout
Caracas and other cities, bringing together (and, indeed, organising)
their communities. Here was a basis for subsequent urban
organisation—e.g., the health committees and then, later, the communal
councils. The needs driving the urban poor, the enormous social debt
inherited from decades of economic deterioration (plus the neoliberal
policies of the 1990s), Bruce proposes, is the sea in which Chávez
swims. It is “one of the secrets of President Chávez’s political
success—for he has shown he knows exactly how to engage with, and build
upon, this pre-existing pattern of popular action”.

That sounds a bit like a classic description of a charismatic
populist leader. But it is a characterisation with which Bruce is not
comfortable. Indeed, he comments that many left approaches to the
relationship between Chávez and the people are “haunted by the spectre
of populism”. Something different is occurring—perhaps captured in
Chávez’s well-known statement: “If we want to put an end to poverty, we
have to give power to the poor.” Bruce stresses that “we need to try
very hard to understand both sides of this combination”, this nexus of
centralised policies issuing from Chávez and the “diverse field of
initiatives bubbling up from below”, and “we need to try to understand
what happens when the two intersect”.

We begin to understand this as we listen to the successive voices of
those who have thrown their efforts into the new cooperatives,
development poles like the Fabricio Ojeda Endogenous Development
Nucleus, the land occupations of the latifundia, the factory
occupations, the famous example of “co-management” in ALCASA (the state
aluminum plant), and the communal councils. How can you not be inspired
by these stories of people who have never worked before, and are now
taking pride in their jobs, people who feel that they are in charge?
(“Nobody is the chief here. We are the owners of our own decisions.”)

These are the accounts of people looking to a future with hope for
their children, community members explaining how and what they learned
in the process of participatory budgeting, workers (in, for example,
ALCASA) enthusing about co-management: “This is socialism of the
twenty-first century... It’s a new, humanist system.”

Obstacles

But it is also a story of obstacles. Significant obstacles,
including private ownership, a dysfunctional legal system, an old
bureaucracy, a new bureaucracy, disinterested and uncommitted Chavist
officials, inefficiency and enemies within. We hear about these
obstacles in the initial accounts of the protagonists in 2004, but
their existence is undeniable from the reports Bruce hears upon his
return, two years later.

Nowhere was there a defeat more obvious than
in the case of ALCASA. Describing the end to co-management in this
state company, the workers attributed much of the reversal to the
opposition of the managers. “The mafia of the old management”, said
one, “try their hardest to keep as much as possible for their mates in
the private sector.” But the problem was also that ALCASA had been left
alone to make it—rather than being given attention and encouragement at
the beginning of the process, which would have then spread to other
state sectors. Instead, it was treated as an orphan. “We were left on
our own”, commented another worker, “isolated and blockaded like Cuba,
except our gusanos [worms] were still on the inside, not outside.”

Although not as dramatic, Bruce discovers similar setbacks
elsewhere: agricultural cooperatives that did not survive because of
lack of support, land titles not delivered, legislation not forthcoming
(as well as inadequacies of the actors themselves—e.g., “deeply rooted
individualist habits and prejudices” within peasant cooperatives). He
highlights a mix of advances and retreats.

Sometimes the response to the obstacles presented by indifferent and
antagonistic officials and managers was to find new ways to fight (as
in the case of the community of Galipan). In other cases, the hopes
raised by Chávez were crushed by the lack of progress or opposition.
Describing the demise of many land committees in one community, an
activist commented, “No one is going to waste their time if there is no
respuesta [response].” As one militant from ALCASA put it,
“when you start to give democracy and power to working people they
start to demand results from you. When they don’t get results, when you
can’t solve their problems, you tend to react by withdrawing support
from those committees. So they got marginalized and the workers going
to them became disillusioned; they couldn’t see the point and stopped
going along.” But this was a state company—in a state dominated at the
top by Chavists.

The question of the state

The state, the state! Everywhere we come back to the obstacles
within the existing state. Here is the dilemma that Bruce communicates:
tension between popular movements and popular power, on the one hand,
and, on the other hand, a state from which there is often “no respuesta”.
Protagonistic democracy (rather than representative democracy) and new
productive relations under the control of popular power, Bruce
understands, suggest a vision of socialism “strikingly different” from
the visions that dominated the 20th century.[1]
Yet we see a realisation of that vision coming up against the existing
state. “Is it possible”, he asks, “to envision the emergence of new
state structures defending a new set of social interests, alongside or
even within the old state which defends the old class interests?”

That, indeed, is the critical question emerging from Bruce’s look at “the real Venezuela”. But it is a question that transcends
the Venezuelan case. “The central problem for the Bolivarian
movement—and perhaps for most conceivable revolutionary processes in
today’s world—is right here: how do you get around the existing
apparatus, when you first came to power through it (that is, you were
elected into office)?” What is the appropriate relationship between
this new popular power and the old state—not only in Venezuela but
anywhere?

Here is “one of the central dilemmas posed by the Bolivarian
experience in Venezuela, and potentially by almost any other imaginable
transition towards socialism in the twenty-first century”. Should the
emerging forms of popular power, communal councils and workers'
councils, “the seeds of a different kind of state … be regulated,
institutionalised, even initiated by laws and regulations emanating
from the old state machine?” The answers to this question “go to the
heart of what any socialist democracy worth the name might really look
like”.[2]

These are absolutely critical questions. Of course, all states are
not equal, and the Venezuelan state—a rentist state that stands above
society and has bred a deep culture of corruption and clientalism—is a
particularly hard nut to crack.[3]
Precisely because of the character of that state, so much of the
Bolivarian Revolution has involved bypassing its organised structures
(as in the case of the social missions).[4]
Is the existing apparatus of the Venezuelan state, then, the obstacle
to the realisation of socialism for the 21st century in
Venezuela?

Certainly, we must be aware (as Bruce is) of the obstacles presented
by the continuing strength of capital in particular sectors, such as
import processing, finance and the media, as well as the continuing
subversion by imperialism and the threat of its intervention (direct or
by proxy). However, insofar as we can listen to the voices of the
people through Bruce’s reporting, this conflict between state and
popular power is what they identify as thwarting them! What
stands between them and the realisation of the goals of the Bolivarian
Revolution, their own experiences tell them, are the bureaucrats and
the office holders—the people they have learned not to trust. It is why
they listen to Chávez but “not to those around him”.

But for how long? If the real steps toward realisation of that
vision of socialism for the 21st century are frustrated by
state/party bureaucrats and office holders, at what point do grassroots
activists conclude that they are wasting their time? At what point does
apathy set in, even with respect to Chávez (who, after all, has chosen
state ministers and party leaders)? Bruce ends with an expression of
hope that the new party insisted upon by Chávez, the United Socialist
Party (PSUV), will satisfy the communities and militants “fed up with the
delays and diversions thrown up by so many officials and bureaucrats,
and hungry for an effective expression of their own power and
interests”. Unfortunately, thus far, that new party has exhibited a
powerful tendency to reproduce the verticalism of the state—to become a
transmission belt going in the wrong direction.

Chávez

Nevertheless, something significant is missing from this picture: the other side of the combination of Chávez and the exploited and excluded. Missing is the response of Chávez to
the initiatives, demands and complaints from below. To understand the
combination, we can’t consider only the voices of the urban poor,
workers and peasants. We also have to consider Chávez’s voice and
actions, the impulse he gets from below—because that impulse is what
keeps people listening to him.

For example, Chávez’s decision in April
2008 to nationalise Sidor, the large steel firm in the industrial
centre of Guayana, was a response to the demands of the steelworkers in
the midst of a dispute with the company that had been the beneficiary
of privatisation under a previous government. Chávez’s announcement of
the nationalisation electrified the organised working class in Guayana
and elsewhere in Venezuela.[5]
As Bruce points out, within a few months, the Sidor “workers themselves
had begun to relaunch the discussion about what a socialist company
should look like, and how the employees could exercise democratic
control within it”.

But this was really only the beginning of a new dynamic. The next
step occurred with the convening of the workers in the state sectors
(including ALCASA) of the region in May 2009, in conjunction with the ministry of labour, to begin the development of a socialist plan for
Guayana. Following discussions in their worktables, the reports from
the tables began. And the demands multiplied and became more and more
powerful: nationalise the private companies which were supplying
inputs; introduce workers’ control; get rid of the managers opposed to
workers’ rights. The excitement among the workers was contagious (even
for those watching on television). Chávez, present for the reports, sat
there, poker faced, and took notes. When the reports were completed,
the workers got their respuesta. Chávez announced that the
firms in question would be nationalised; said Guayana would lead in
developing a new socialist direction for the country; and called on the
workers to devise a socialist plan within a few months for the heavy
industries of the region. As might be expected, the workers were
ecstatic—cheers, tears, high fives and the spontaneous singing of the
national anthem was their response to Chávez’s respuesta.[6]

Yet this is not the whole story. The workers did meet and came up
with their proposed plan within two months. Then it all came to a halt.
Once again, the gusanos on the inside paralysed the process.
And there it could have remained (depending upon the response of the
workers). In July, however, Chávez breathed new life into the socialist
plan for Guayana: once again he overruled his local officials. He
convened a televised cabinet meeting, endorsed the plan, and declared
that Venezuela now has state capitalism—and you can’t have socialism
without workers' control.

There is a dialectic at work in Venezuela. The dialectical
relationship between Chávez and the masses has driven the process
within Venezuela forward so far; whether it continues, will depend on
the initiatives of both sides. That means the necessity from the top
and the bottom to struggle against the obstacles (many of them there
because Chávez has relied upon particular people, to date). Iain
Bruce’s great accomplishment in The Real Venezuela is that he
does exactly what he set out to do: “to look at the experience of
ordinary Venezuelan women and men, and to listen to their voices, as a
way of getting inside the process.” He thereby provides us with essential insights into the consequences of not struggling to go beyond those barriers.

[This review first appeared in the February 2010 issue of the US socialist journal Monthly Review. Michael A. Lebowitz was a founder of the Centro
Internacional Miranda in Caracas, Venezuela, and has directed a program
there on Transformative Practice and Human Development since 2006. His
publications include Build it Now (Monthly Review Press, 2006), Following Marx
(Haymarket Books, 2009), and The Socialist Alternative (Monthly Review
Press, forthcoming in 2010), as well as several articles on Venezuela in
Monthly Review and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.]

Notes

↩ For a discussion of the concept of socialism for the 21st century, see Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative, forthcoming from Monthly Review Press in 2010.

↩
Bruce raises other important general questions. In looking at the
viability of the cooperative model, for example, he asks at one point:
Could this cooperative survive without the support of PDVSA (the
national oil company)? “Then again, why should it have to?”

↩ See the brilliant discussion of the Venezuelan state in Fernando Coronil, The Magical State

(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997).

↩ See the discussion of the Bolivarian Revolution in Michael A. Lebowitz, Build it Now
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), Chapter 7, “The Revolution of
Radical Needs” and in Michael A. Lebowitz, “Venezuela: A Good Example
of the Bad Left of Latin America”, Monthly Review 59, no. 3 (July-August 2007).

↩
Chávez’s decision in this case involved overruling the local governor
and the soon-to-be-former labour minister, who had taken the side of the
capitalist owners.

↩
The video records placed on the web by the government information
outlets (and available on YouTube) naturally present only Chávez’s
speech and the reaction; this reinforces a picture of gifts from above,
rather than demonstrating Chávez’s response to the demands of workers.